INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE MEDIEVAL WEST
Introduction
AN INTERMEDIATE AGE?
The Middle Ages, one of the four periods of history
Our era has little difficulty in describing as ‘medieval’ what it considers to be archaic and part of
a bygone era; the adjective thus acquires a pejorative nuance that its more scientific synonym
‘medieval’ lacks. But wouldn't it be more difficult to pinpoint the precise period referred to by
this convenient, if unfair, term? Academic tradition places it after Antiquity and before Modern
Times (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), followed by the Contemporary Period (the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The Middle Ages therefore cover a period of ten centuries,
between the end of the Roman Empire in the West and its fall in the East, a millennium later .
(476AD, with the fall of Rome and 1450AD with the fall of Constantinople)
Once this statement, on which everyone agrees, has been made, it becomes trickier to assign
more precise boundaries to medieval times. When should the break with antiquity be introduced?
From the sack of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric in 410 and the establishment of the first Germanic
kingdoms, Visigoth in Spain and Aquitaine, Vandal in North Africa...? Or, later, at the end of
the fifth century, in 476, when Odoacre, the barbarian leader of the Roman army in Italy,
deposed the last emperor of the West, while the imperial title continued to be worn in the East,
in a world that defined itself as the sole heir to Romanity and which was gradually evolving into
a Byzantine Empire? The end might seem easier to determine. If we keep the reference to the
past, to Roman Antiquity, we should retain the date of 1453, the year Constantinople was taken
by the Turks, event that sounded the definitive death knell of the Eastern Roman Empire. If we
prefer to look to the future, we can choose the date of 1492, the date of the discovery of America
by Christopher Columbus, which marks the beginning of the expansion of the boundaries of the
world known to Westerners, a process already heralded by earlier voyages.
High (Haut Moyen Age) Middle Ages, Central Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages
There's no need to dwell on the choice of these key events! Even if they are convenient
points of reference to keep in mind, none of them can ever sum up the vast changes that took
place. It is undeniable that the medieval period has its own specific characteristics, which we
shall discover here, distinguishing it from those that preceded and followed it. But throughout
these ten centuries, time did not stand still: it would therefore be inappropriate to consider them
without nuance. There are many differences between the life of a contemporary of Clovis and
that of a contemporary of Joan of Arc, to mention just two of the great ‘French’ figures. What's
more, the centuries that still made limited use of the written word, right up to the Carolingian
Renaissance, are not as familiar to the historian as those of the 14th and 15th centuries, when the
very first concerns with counting began to emerge. To help us find our way through this deep
1
forest of magicians and hermits, knights errant and hunters, charcoal-burners and land-clearers,
we have traditionally distinguished three periods that correspond to three major phases in
Western history. The first, known as the High Middle Ages, was marked by the gradual
unification of the Germanic kingdoms under Charlemagne and the development of a new culture
under the influence of Christianity. This was followed by the three ‘Golden Centuries’ of
Christianity (950-1250), during which the West witnessed one of the most significant
developments in its history. Then, during the late Middle Ages (1250-1450), the shadows only
slowly gave way, shortly before the middle of the 15th century, to the light of a recovery that
continued into the ‘Beautiful XVI Century’.
A time peculiar to the history of the West...
It is clear from the foregoing that the notion of the Middle Ages is only really relevant to
the history of Western Europe, even if it is used by convention to describe certain societies
whose features seem to be similar: pre-Meiji Japan or the Russian world before the abolition of
serfdom. It was during the medieval period that this small, advanced cape of Asia asserted its
primacy and acquired powerful factors of unity (development of an original rural and urban
landscape, principal cultural references), but also the seeds of its future internal divisions
(linguistic diversity, formation of nations, religious cleavages). When we talk about Western
Europe, we are not talking about the lands that were part of the Muslim world or Byzantium.
Certain areas, such as ancient Roman Dalmatia or the Mediterranean islands, Sicily in particular,
were the scene of bitter struggles for political, economic and religious influence. They still bear
the scars of this struggle, but they also gained from it the richness of lands of contact where, over
and above armed confrontations, different cultures mutually nourished each other.
The territorial limits of the West are sometimes difficult to define, especially as they
change from the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages. These were mainly linguistic and
religious. The West, heir to the western half of the Roman Empire minus the territories
conquered by Islam, was characterised above all by the use of Latin and the languages directly
derived from it. This is also the world where Christianity is practised according to the Latin
tradition and rites, in communion with and under the authority of the Church of Rome. The
regions bordering it are either lands of Islam, where the dominant religion is Muslim and Arabic
is the language spoken and understood, even if it does not reign alone; or lands under Byzantine
authority, frequently referred to in Western texts as <<the world of the Greeks>. The term, which
no longer refers to the Hellenes of Antiquity, applies as much to the language as to the religion, a
Christianity that is intended to be the ‘Greek world’, Orthodox’, as we say today, and which its
rites distinguish from those of the Latins.
Reputed to be Dark, or Reputedly Dark... Known to be Dark…
The first to give an appearance of unity to this long period were the Italian humanists
who, from the 14th century onwards, were aware that they were experiencing a break with their
2
immediate past. Fervent admirers of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, they scorned the time that
separated them from Antiquity, which they saw as a single block whose only merit, in their eyes,
was to have linked this luminous era with their own. The interval was then described as middle
time, in the sense of intermediate, and mediocre, or even dark, a concept preserved in the English
expression dark ages. Petrarch was the first, followed in the fifteenth century by Ghiberti,
Giorgio Vasari and Lorenzo Valla, who vied with each other in describing these obscure
generations with condescending and pejorative terms that were matched only by their praise of
Antiquity! Under their pens, the Middle Ages earned their well-established reputation as a
barbaric, violent and cruel time (what period could escape this?), anarchic or dominated by
tyrannical religious and civil powers, and whose artistic production, known as Gothic, in
reference to the Germanic people of the Goths, could not find favour in their eyes compared to
the masterpieces of Antiquity. This adjective, now used to designate a specific style of medieval
art, relegated to the background all the works bequeathed by ten centuries of creation... Forged in
this way, the division of historical periods into Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times,
with all the prejudices it entailed, was to be widely used by philosophers and men of letters in the
17th and 18th centuries. Reformed thinkers stigmatised these times dominated by the
obscurantism of the Roman Church; they were more moderately followed by Catholic supporters
of a national (Gallican, as it was called in the kingdom of France) and humanist Church. The
height of contempt was reached in the Age of Enlightenment, when Voltaire saw ‘savage
ignorance supplanted by scholastic ignorance’. The cliché stuck for a long time: it's still alive in
contemporary discourse and images!
Recently rehabilitated
Yet powerful currents of rehabilitation have endeavoured to overturn it, perhaps too
systematically in their idolatry, replacing the black legend with a golden legend that is just as
false... The first of these came in the nineteenth century and was based in particular on the
persistence in the culture of a whole medieval substratum, as illustrated by the great figures of
Charlemagne and his valiant men, or those of the heroes of Brittany, Merlin and his entourage.
The Romantic movement brilliantly and loudly demonstrated a pronounced taste for the Middle
Ages. First in England, then in France and Germany, and later in Italy, artists drew abundantly
on medieval history, the richness of which fed their imaginations and inspired opera librettos,
poetry, plays and novels, not to mention ideas for paintings, furniture and monuments in the so-
called ‘troubadour’ style. As European nations grew, they found their founding heroes in the
Middle Ages: Robin Hood in England, Saint Louis in France, the Cid in Spain, the Mastersingers
in Germany and William Tell in Switzerland. Ideologists got involved, Catholics to exalt this
great age of faith, bourgeois liberals to reclaim the communal movement and, later, fascists in
relation to the corporatist movement, or various regionalisms based in Brittany on the Celtic
tradition, or in Languedoc on the Cathar legend. Even more detached from political
considerations - and perhaps we should take a closer look - the historians of the Nouvelle His-
toire, led by Marc Bloch, also did much to promote a fairer appreciation of the Middle Ages.
3
And their efforts were not without their share of public enthusiasm, as illustrated by a number of
booksellers' successes, such as Montaillou, village occitan.
However, all these passions gave rise to less noisy initiatives that served the cause of the
Middle Ages just as well, namely a large number of learned institutions on which all serious
historical work is based. Under the impetus, in France in particular, of the Ecole des Chartes,
founded in 1821, the learned societies that flourished in the nineteenth century in the various
provinces, not forgetting the pioneering work of religious or lay ‘antiquarians’ from the fifteenth
century onwards, the Ecole des Chartes, founded in 1821, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, founded
in the eighteenth century, XVIII centuries (Mabillon), and the regional or national academies, an
imposing mass of documentary material has been assembled which is indispensable to any
serious study of the period. The great political and literary texts have been published, dictionaries
of the languages in use at the time, Latin and vernacular, have been compiled, and what can be
said of the precious registers of archive inventories, familiar to all researchers who now frequent
them in increasing numbers. It is up to future generations, provided they remain keenly interested
in history and are imaginative in their analysis of documents, to continue this movement from
which the Middle Ages benefited just as much as other periods. Wouldn't this be the best way to
demonstrate to those who still share this view that the Voltairean cliché of medieval
obscurantism is a thing of the past?
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MIDDLE AGES?
A manageable volume of sources
It goes without saying that our knowledge of a historical period is based on the
information it has bequeathed to us. But the nature and quantity of this information varies
considerably from one period to the next. What a difference there is between the imposing files
produced by 20th century civil servants and the few tablets that Sumerian historians pore over!
In either case, the resulting knowledge is not of lesser quality: it is different. It is simply a matter
of being ingenious and perceptive in the way we approach the sources, using methods that are
constantly being renewed and adapted to the specific concerns of each generation of historians.
This is how history can continue to evolve, even when the volume of sources is no longer
growing...
The Middle Ages offer researchers a wealth of information that is neither too extensive
nor too incomplete. The written sources that have been preserved are distributed very unevenly
over the course of the ten centuries: their volume is increasing, particularly from the 19th century
onwards, due to the development of a number of new documents. The development of national
states and, more generally, the increased use of the written word in social life. At the same time,
material data, which until recently had received little attention in historical research, is now
widely taken into account. These include the results of archaeological excavations, collections of
4
various objects preserved in museums or even by private individuals, and the inescapable
heritage of monuments.
The age of the rare book
From the 5th to the 15th century, the conditions under which written documents were
produced changed dramatically, and it is important to bear these changes in mind, as they
determined the importance attached to their production. The value of a book, both in terms of its
market value and its emotional value, and the use to which it is put, cannot be the same in the age
of the printing press and the pocket book as it was in the age when it took a scribe more than a
year to copy the entire text of the Bible! And this applies to any written work.
Throughout the period, mastery of writing, a difficult technique to acquire, remained the
preserve of an initially small but gradually growing number of educated people. At first, these
were mainly men of the Church, canons gathered around bishops, monks and a few individuals
in the service of princes. In such a context, the written word was not a matter of chance; it was
reserved for the foundations of society: religious texts - the Christian Scriptures and their
commentaries by the Fathers of the Church, the sources of memory - the works of rare historians,
such as Gregory of Tours(Who wrote the the life of Clovis the Emperor) († around 594), or the
Royal Annals - and even a few official documents - texts of barbarian laws or Carolinian
capitularies. Gradually, and at different times depending on the region, well before the year 1000
in Mediterranean countries, and much later in more northerly areas, the use of written documents
began to replace oral ones. The courts rediscovered written proof, masters stipulated their rights,
the dominates limited arbitrariness by having their duties recorded in charters, merchants drew
up contracts, and the development of urban schools, followed by the emergence of universities,
stimulated the production of books. In practice, the written word was no longer confined to
monastic workshops, known as scriptoria, or to princely chancelleries, but spread to the world of
cities. Instead of entrusting the production of a work from A to Z to the same scribe, it was
subdivided into sections that were reproduced simultaneously by several scribes, in order to
speed up completion. From the XПth century onwards, paper began to replace parchment as the
preferred material for everyday documents. Although parchment was more resistant, it was also
more expensive; however, until the end of the period, skin remained the preferred material for
luxury items, such as the illuminated books that enriched princely libraries. Writing became
faster, cursive, say the specialists, less calligraphic, but also less easy to read for subsequent
generations! The use of vernacular languages balanced out that of Latin. As a result, written
documents are gradually losing the almost sacred value they once had and still hold in the minds
of those who are furthest removed from them.
Despite the effort involved in writing, which many a copyist complains about at the end
of a manuscript, asking the reader to spare a thought for the person who has worked his hand for
long, sometimes cold, hours, medieval times have bequeathed us a wealth of documentary
collections, with elements of very different natures. It is common to make convenient
5
distinctions between them. The main distinction is between what are known as literary sources,
works of composition, and what are known as practical sources, born of the exercise of power,
exchanges and the transmission of goods.
Literary sources
For a long time, literary productions were considered the only noble works worthy of
interest. Paradoxically, medieval literature, too little known to historians, plunges its readers into
a world with cultural roots which, although Christianised, borrow from folklore, a grammar of
symbols and a mythology populated by fairies and enchanters about which, often, no other text
exists. Some great figures are still remembered: de epic literature, i.e. from the chanson de geste
(understood in the etymological sense of ‘feat’), emerge those of Charlemagne, Roland and other
valiant men; from the vast material of the romances of chivalry, those of the heroes of the Quest
for the Grail and the knights of the Round Table gathered around King Arthur. Films and comic
strips bear witness to the vitality of medieval epics and legends; these sagas, somewhat
reworked, have retained their seductive power in the 20th century, having provided many
sources of inspiration for writers of the previous century. Poetry and theatre, on the other hand,
whether religious or secular, seem further away, even if Léo Ferré has sung poems by Rutebeuf
and Georges Brassens by François Villon! However, collections of poems do reveal some more
personal echoes, which can also be seen in the all-too rare collections of correspondence - which,
as in antiquity, is a literary art - and autobiographies, the most famous of which is that of the
monk Guibert de Nogent († circa 1124).
In addition to works of fiction, there were many didactic works on a wide range of
subjects, from the art of hunting (Livre de la chasse by Gaston Phébus, † in 1391) to political
treatises and other Miroirs des Princes. In the Middle Ages, as in other periods, many people
were preoccupied with writing history or having it written: princes anxious to leave a ‘fair’
record of their reign, monastic communities celebrating the prestige of their founder and his
successors, aristocratic families forging their identity in the exaltation of their ancestors, real or
mythical (think of the place of the fairy Mélusine in the Lusignan family). These works, usually
chronicles, are called Annales when they are written year by year. Some authors do not hesitate
to begin their work at the creation of the world, thus recapitulating the entire history of the
salvation of mankind from a Christian perspective, before moving on to their own era: this is
because, for them, history has a meaning that they strive to reveal to their readers. Far from
smiling at such an approach, let's instead consider all that it can reveal about the mental universe
of that time, its understanding of the world, its hierarchy of values. More freely written are the
various memoirs or accounts of travels of the time. Ages, such as that of Marco Polo, the
Venetian traveller who died in 1324, or the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, written by a canon
of Notre-Dame during the dark days of the Hundred Years' War.
Medieval literature also includes a major sector, which specialists call hagiography, i.e.
the literary genre of the Lives of Saints. The period was very fond of these stories, some
6
legendary, others more well-founded, which set out to edify and entertain by recounting the
extraordinary lives of martyred saints, evangelists, hermits, monks or bishops, and other more
contemplative charismatic figures. Neglected until recently by positivist critics who saw them as
nothing more than repetitive, low-grade literature riddled with the marvellous, they are now the
subject of studies that have revealed their richness in terms of understanding medieval
‘mentalities’. The same is true of all the works born of the practice of preaching, which was
highly developed from the 11th century onwards. The few biographies that have come down to
us, such as those of King Louis IX, the future Saint Louis, are also approached with slightly
different critical methods.
Practical sources
Practical sources, produced on a daily basis by the life of society (official documents
from civil and ecclesiastical chancelleries, inventories of rights and property, judicial or notarial
collections, among others), may be less prestigious, but they are nonetheless extremely fertile.
Alongside the archives of power, ordinances, diplomas or acts of various assemblies, the daily
bread of the historian for ages, the generations trained in the school of the Annales have
discovered the wealth of economic sources, descriptions of estates and various inventories drawn
up by the public authorities, one of the most famous examples of which is the Domesday Book
which, in 1086, for William the Conqueror, describes the state of the newly subjugated England.
Private archives, whether monastic, urban or noble, also provide account registers, not forgetting
the inexhaustible mine of notarial documents in which transactions and deeds are recorded.
Medieval society is revealed in all its aspects, both material and spiritual. The study of these
various types of document is governed by very precise rules: for example, that of ‘diplomacy’ or
the science of diplomas, the name given to deeds that establish a right. When they are presented
in sufficiently large series (ordinances from a single reign or charters recording all the titles of a
religious establishment, for example), they sometimes allow the use of quantitative methods.
The recent contribution of material sources
The use of material sources (particularly buildings, everyday objects and works of art)
has recently become commonplace in medieval studies. This has led to a considerable renewal of
our knowledge, particularly in the Early Middle Ages, where the corpus of written sources is
more limited, but from which the entire period has benefited.
The movement draws on a whole range of information from the data provided by archaeology,
which, as far as medieval studies are concerned, began actively well before the Second World
War in England, Germany and the countries of Eastern and Northern Europe, while France has
been trying to catch up for the last twenty years or so. The results obtained are first-rate, based
on highly technical working methods that require the collaboration of scientists. Here are just a
few examples. Aerial observation, using photos taken at different times of year, under a variety
of lighting conditions and, in some cases, using infrared, has revealed a multitude of ancient
7
land-use sites that have now disappeared. Excavations are carried out in villages, city quarters or
cemeteries, according to programmes drawn up over several years or, more frequently, during
building or road works: these are known as ‘rescue’ excavations. They provide a wealth of new
information on the location and expansion of settlements and centres of power (castles), as well
as on material culture: everyday objects used in cooking, cooking, tools and building techniques.
Exploring burial sites allows us to assess the evolution of the burial rites in use, and to measure
the progress of the burial process.
In addition, a more detailed study of the skeletons uncovered provides fascinating information on
the anthropological realities of medieval populations (human types or health status, for example),
which enriches demographic studies, clarifies the ethnic origins of peoples and reveals the state
of health of individuals.
The enthusiasm for excavations should not detract from the interest shown by the monuments
still standing - castles, fortified walls, communal palaces in Italian towns, cloth halls in Flemish
cities, not to mention the countless churches, cathedrals, monasteries, convents and modest
buildings in rural parishes. Added to this are the objects collected in national or private
collections, and the abundance of imagery bequeathed by the medieval world in the form of
sculptures, wall or easel paintings, and the treasure trove of illuminations. In this respect, recent
studies based on iconographic sources have proved, if proof were needed, their fruitfulness,
whether on the subject of the place of the child in society, which was not as depreciated as was
once thought, agrarian techniques or religious sentiment.
The above list should not lead us to believe that each type of source is approached independently
of the others; on the contrary! The most fruitful results are obtained by combining and
comparing the information provided by written and material sources for the same period or
theme. Let's hope that their presentation has convinced us of the wealth of documentation for a
period falsely reputed to be obscure, and of the ever-awakening imagination of the researchers
who exploit it.
THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
CHAPTER I
THE TIME OF THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
Whatever the precise date chosen to mark the end of the Empire in the West, it is clear that the
fifth century sounded the death knell of Roman unity and led to the emergence of a new political
and cultural order, divided into several areas where peoples with varied customs and distinct,
even opposing, religious practices coexisted. The faithful followers of Roman civilisation, such
as Sidonius Apollinaris († around 486), bishop of Clermont in Auvergne and also a poet,
deplored the disappearance of Roman civilisation, swept away by these newcomers with their
long hair, their love of cooking with butter rather than olive oil and, above all, their ignorance of
8
the Latin language and its written culture. Fewer were the witnesses who saw in these hours of
change what hindsight reveals: the emergence of an original phase of civilisation in the West.
Barbarian incursions...
Weakened from within by the instability of imperial power (the divisions within the tetrachates,
refusal of romans to join the army), as well as by economic difficulties (a declining demography)
and cultural problems (the declining credibility of the values of civic religion and paganism,
which no longer held society together as firmly), the Roman Empire found it hard to resist the
pressure of the <<barbarian >> peoples who had settled on its borders. However, the two parts
of the territory resulting from the division conceived by Theodosius I in 395 did not react
uniformly: the East, around Constantinople, was more prosperous and, thanks to its wealth,
managed to contain them more easily; the West, around Rome, seems to have been more
deprived.
The West, around Rome, seems to have been more deprived. Those we call ‘Barbarians’,
following the usage of the Ancients who described all peoples in this way
